Be Interactive in your Fitness Training!
UK vs USA Video from BBC and NBC TV Coverage
See http://www.youtube.com/v/9EnRd0Guegk
Check back for news on the next tournament with more countries, more players, more games and more fitness. Start training with Beijing 2008 for Xbox 360 and PS3 now and maybe you can make the team and represent your country.
Online Gamercize Tournament Equivalent to planting 140 trees!
As the utility bills come in it is easy to see the cost of energy is rising painfully. Apart from the cash cost of using fuel there is also the environmental costs, most easily measured by carbon calculations.
Most people can have a little leeway in the miles they drive or tweaking the temperature setting by a few degrees, but the most obvious cost and carbon saver is leisure and sporting activity.
I read the Beijing Olympics are going to produce some 1.18 million tonnes of carbon which works out at 225,000 lbs per entrant. That is very nearly a quarter of a million pounds of carbon per participant!
Curiously, I looked into what Gamercize's online exergaming tournament cost in terms of carbon, and what it would have cost had we flown one of the teams to make the event a face-to-face competition.
Taking into account heat, light, transport, electricity for consoles and equipment we used less than 6 lbs of carbon per participant for the tournament; going online with Xbox 360 for the games and Gamercize for the exercise.
Comparing this to the massive spend of the Olymipics is a little unfair, so I ran the numbers again, this time as if we flew one team between California and England. We came out at more than 2,800 lbs of carbon per participant.
Although I am not a great fan of carbon offsetting (i.e. just use less energy to start with!), I checked, and in order to offset a face-to-face tournament against the actual online Gamercize tournament would have required planting 140 trees.
So the next time someone asks you what your are doing playing video games, you can say, quite literally, "I'm saving the planet".
Following on from the World's First International Online Exergaming Tournament.
It has been an interesting journey of discovery for everyone involved in the first tournament combining both video games and exercise in a single competition. The outcome was Team Gamercize UK won four of the six soccer matches, Team Gamercize USA won one, and the last game was a tie with seconds to spare before the end of the event.
Adding the game points and the exercise points gave the bragging rights to the "World Exergame Champions" title to the UK with 14,981 points against the US total of 6,472. When I have all the pictures and video together I will post a full write up.
Now we don't like to hang about at Gamercize, so we are looking to the next exergame tournament where we can officially put the championship title up for grabs. So far there are six countries interested in fielding a team and we can use what we have learned so far to make the next competition bigger and even better!
There was some concern, on both sides of the Atlantic I must add, to choosing a soccer game as the basis of the USA vs UK event. For the next event we are looking at running with multiple titles over different game genres, or maybe we should use just one title - Beijing 2008, the Official Olympic Video Game.
I like the concept of this game because it allows online play and supports Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. Due to the unique interaction between game and exercise in Gamercize there is no other exergame product that can be used with this game title. The control requires a multitude of inputs on buttons, bumpers, triggers and twin directional sticks, people just don't have enough arms and legs for non-gamepad control!
Come to think of it there is no other exergame product for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC anyway, so this title looks like it's top of the list for now. I tend to let the experts be the experts in my approach, so if the Olymipic committee has already sought agreeable sports for all countries, then why not follow their lead for our own Exergame Olympics!
